It is time to write about celebration, when one is in
mourning! It is time to write about joy, when one is sad! It is indeed time to
write about the gift, when one experiences yet another cruel act of being
robbed, of a snatching, of felt loss. If in the first part the aim was to
understand festivals in light of the carnival or the carnivalesque, in light of
Bakhtin’s rendition of it – carnival or the celebration of festivals as the
revolt of the common man against the power structures – and we were able to
confidently conclude that the carnivalesque was not sufficient to understand the
continued powerful presence of festivals, then in this part, we will precisely
go beyond the carnivalesque to seek understanding of festivals, by asking a
deeper question – why are festivals important to humans?
There were two responses to the
first part. The first, argued that festivals ‘express and shape the desires,
emotional response and imagination of the participants offering a sense of incorporation
shared with others in a wider culture…The aim in most festivals would be
celebration and a sense of belonging’. The second response in the form of
poetry, celebrating Christmas, as it is indeed an important festival of
December. It used the language of ‘coming’ on the one hand and ‘receiving’,
‘welcoming’, recognizing’ on the other hand. It brings to fore the idea of
something being ‘given’ which is consequently ‘recognized’ ‘welcomed’ and
‘received’ – what is it that is given and received during a festival? Of
course, it is gifts – it is gifts that are both given and received during
festivals.
In a recent post – Transforming
Gratitude: Lessons from the Act of Writing, I had given three insights from the
act of writing that shed light on the deeper mechanisms underlying the language
of gratitude. Simply put, if gratitude is offered at the ‘reception of the
gift’ then prior to the receiving, for the gift to be truly appreciated and grateful
for, the receiver must exercise a ‘posture of enquiry’ and been in an ‘act of
questing’ and then the gift is in some sense an answer, a recompense to this
quest and enquiry. It is then and only then, when the received gift is in line
with the enquiry and quest that gratitude manifests. There was a fascinating
response to this post which tied these three insights to bear upon the festival
of Christmas. I will quote the response at length as I believe in it lies a
deep insight to the question we are addressing here – Why are festivals
important to humans?
After giving a list of references
and quotes from the Bible about how Christmas is God’s gift to us, Bernard Farr
writes, ‘It had not struck me before that in all these cases there is an
equation between the gift of Jesus and the gift of eternal life – so that to
receive one is to receive the other. So perhaps the point of Christmas is not
so much that it celebrates God coming to share in time-limed human life
(incarnation) but the opposite. It celebrates our coming to share in the life
of God which is eternal.’ He ends by writing, ‘Christmas is only truly
Christmas insofar as the Christian community together appropriates the eternal.
In this way God is writing in our lives as he gifts himself in his Son.’
The writing on the wall appears to
get clearer now! The clear resonance between festivals and gifts or charity!
Now, that is commonsensical, you claim! Of course it is, only that we had
completely missed it in our first list of what constitutes festivals – celebration,
commemoration, cheer and carnivalesque! So now let’s add the fifth to our list
– charity as gift! It is not just an interesting idea, but something that is
existentially part of festivals, in other words, the giving and receiving of
charity or gifts is synonymous with the celebration of festivals. Evidence for
this is found in the financial records of both persons and companies during
festival times. The question that stares us in our face is – what is the
conceptual structure that conjoins charity and celebration, or gifts and
festivals? In other words, how is celebration of festivals related to charity
or gifting or giving? And it is to this that we must turn.
But before we come to gifting in a
festival, we must look at the act of gifting in its own right, as an
existential act with its own ontology. So what is gifting and how is it related
to the human condition? We are going to progress by looking intently at the
everyday act of gifting. There are three insights about gifting that can be
easily observed from (a) the act of gifting or the giving of gifts, (b) the
gift, or what is given and (c) the receiving of gift.
First, the act of giving as an act
of experiencing loss! The commodification of gifts and its regulation has in
some sense made a mockery of gifting. In other words we have domesticated
gifting. We can manage getting all our loved ones a gift if we plan well and
save enough to give, and avoid experiencing loss. We have anesthetised giving. But
that is precisely what giving of gift is not meant to do. The gifting is meant
to leave a hole in the wallet. The giver is meant to experience loss because
she has given. She is meant to experience suffering as she has paid to bring
forth joy to the other in the very act of giving. The larger the gift, the
smaller becomes the giver, more oblivious, and the act of giving diminishes the
giver, in every respect. When the giving is truly completed, there is no trace
of the giver, become invisible or disappeared, because she has given all. In
this sense, the giver is hidden behind the gift, so that the giver disappears
even as the gift is presented. Marion has a few interesting lines on the
masking of the giving and the giver: ‘In donation, in fact, the giving (Geben)
gives to presence the gift (Gabe), so completely and radically that this gift
alone occupies presence and, in appearing, necessarily masks its own donation;
or, more properly speaking, the gift (Gabe, beings) has no need of
illegitimately obfuscating the giving (Geben, being), since it is the right of
the giving itself, on the contrary, not to be able to give the gift, to offer
it, to deliver it, to put it to the fore, but by concealing itself behind it,
because giving can never appear as something given since it exhausts and
accomplishes itself in allowing to appear – it does not occupy the opening,
because it opens it.’ Simply put there is a loss of the giver in giving. But
what exactly is the loss? What exactly is hidden or concealed?
For this we have to go behind
Marion to Heidegger. The loss is of the infinite possibilities the gift had
before being given which by the act of giving has now been limited to a bounded
actuality, a historicality, if one must insist. The gift had the potential of
being utilized in infinite ways to accomplish infinite purposes respectively,
but the very actual act of giving to a particular, limits it to that receiver
and eliminates all other possibilities hence the experience of loss. Take the
example of a donor who wishes to sponsor the education of an underprivileged child.
As long as she has got those pounds, dollars or rupees in her wallet, she can
do whatever she wants with it. She can sponsor any child in the world. But once
she decides and gives the money to that agency for that child, she is unable to
use her funds for any other child. The loss is not of the money, because she
did want to give it, but it is of the infinite other potentialities that the
money unspent could accomplish before it was given which in the act of giving
have been now lost, lost for ever. This understanding of life as potentiality
with infinite possibilities which experiences loss in being actualized is a
basic condition of being human. Death is the loss of possibilities and we mourn
it every day in the very act of living, even as the actuality of our lived life
murders a million unlived lives. In this sense, living itself is dying, dying
of the infinite other possibilities that failed to be actualised in the very
actualizing of our daily life. If this be the case then becoming human and mere
living is to nurture a loss. This sense of loss is what we are doomed to live with
and every hunt for a gift is a way of overcoming this loss. When one does not
receive gifts, then one steals, one even snatches. This sets up the rationale
for the reception of gift. But before that a few brief thoughts about the gift.
Secondly, gift as a presentation
of a new world of possibilities. Both Heidegger and picking up from him,
Jean-Luc Marion, talk a great deal about the ontological significance of the
gift. Going back to Marion’s above quote, ‘In donation, in fact, the giving
(Geben) gives to presence the gift (Gabe), so completely and radically that
this gift alone occupies presence…’. In other words for Marion everything that
has presence, or is present, is able to be present, or come into existence, has
only been made possible as a gift. But what is it that has become present and
has presence? Wrathall brings in the idea of a ‘sense of place’. So what
exactly is a gift? It is a new place, a new possibility, a new potential that
has the power to be actualized. In some sense, within the wrappings are hidden
a world of possibilities. Wrathall asks, ‘But how can anything really come to
matter in this thick sense in a world that is moving swiftly toward abolishing
all sense of place?’ and answers his own question by saying, ‘This sort of
mattering or importance is not something we can bestow upon things by a free
act of will. The only way to get it would be as a gift–a gift of place or a
gift of a thing of intrinsic worth.’ The only thing that contains new
possibilities, a new place, is the gift, something that is unavailable to the
receiver prior to the reception of the gift. For Wrathall, the power of the
gift lies precisely in bestowing importance or mattering, bringing about a new
sense of place. However, while the gift brings in new possibilities, the gift
equally brings with it its own place and limitation. Thus even in the reception
of a gift, new losses are felt and new longings born. Thus the gift is a
double-edged sword – at one end it slices in new possibilities, and at the
other end, these very possibilities that have the potential for actuality,
bring with it its own limitation in their actualizing, thus births longings for
future gifts.
Finally, the reception of gifts as
an overcoming of death! Gifts are wrapped, hidden, and there is the sense of it
not being there are all for the receiver prior to the giving. Hence at the
opportune time, the gift is revealed and handed over and in some cultures even
asked to be unwrapped. There is an anticipation, an eagerness, even as one
fumbles with the wrappings, an urgency to get beneath the covers, to hold the
gift, to stand in the presence of a new naked revelation, a new actuality is
born in the life of the receiver. In some cultures both the wrapping and
unwrapping of gifts are rituals of equal significance. It is this reception of
a gift that undoubtedly causes the joy and the celebration. The festival lies
precisely in this reception of gifts. On one hand festivals are mere occasions,
often excuses, to exercise this act of giving and receiving to generate
celebration and joy. But before we get to festivals, let us continue to explore
the ontological significance of receiving. I heard a man once claim that when
he saw Bill Gates having a meal with Melinda three tables across in a Seattle
restaurant, he told the waiter to pass this message to Bill that he will pick
up their tab. Even as he watched the waiter lean to pass on the message and
point to the benefactor of their meal, this man swore that he caught a
primordial glee, joy, in Bill’s face, one that comes in receiving a gift. His
point being, even the world’s richest man is joyful in getting a freebie or a
gift. Why are humans besoughted with receiving gifts? Receiving has value when
what is received fulfils a lack, even if it be an artificially constructed
lack. But it is the condition of lack that gives currency to the reception of
gifts. The fact that we come into this world crying, howling for our mother’s
milk is evidence enough for the birth of the fundamental condition of lack in
being human. Today’s liberalism blinds us to our existential condition of lack.
But what exactly is this lack? If we dovetail this lack to what the gift
signifies and what giving accomplishes, then in light of what we have said
above, we can say that this lack is the lack of possibilities and potentialities.
In this sense, the existential condition of being human is that of exhaustion,
the actuality of being exhausts itself of all power to be. Therefore, one is
constantly in need of gifts from the other. Be it food, shelter, love, material
or non-material, it does not matter, but humans constantly need to be gifted so
that they can have life and overcome the death that is already in operation
which constantly creates the existential lack.
There are different possibilities
for how these meditations can be taken forward and different conclusions
arrived at. But the journey we must actualize is our quest to understand
festivals and answer the question we began with – why are festivals important
to humans? I am sure the reader can already begin to see, in light of the above
discussion, the shape of the answer. If receiving is central to being human to
overcome an existential lack, then the giving that results in receiving is
surely the cause of celebration. However, we have already seen the condition of
lack is a perennial human condition, and if that be so, then what are
festivals? Here I claim that festivals remember, commemorate and celebrate an
original event of giving, a phenomenal giving that has left its imprint in
collective human memory. In other words, festivals are celebrations of cosmic
‘givings’. Within the Christian tradition, Christmas celebrates God’s giving of
his son, Jesus and Easter celebrates Christ’s giving of his self. In Hindu
tradition Diwali celebrates the returning or giving of Ram to the capital city,
Ayodhya. Be it Hanukah or Dusshera, the originary event that is commemorated is
one of giving – of new life, hence celebration of birth dates, of victory in
war, of salvation to people, or whatever else form the gifting might take shape.
However, following Farr, I would
like to end by arguing that the power of festivals lies not merely in the
commemoration and remembrance of an old event, however cosmic, but of its
significance in fulfilling present day lack. Festival is the occasion for receiving. But can one receive except what one is
given! So festivals provide the occasion to give and to receive, to overcome
the existential human condition of lack, to open new possibilities and
potentials, to offer the presence of new places. The power of the gift lies in
it being less deserved, more of a surprise, a bringing about of possibilities
completely unforeseen. It is indeed loving without a reason, a giving without
rationale, and a silent suffering in the presence of the other’s discovery of a
new world. What better words than that of Caputo to end with – ‘But then again,
must love be deserved – or is love a gift? If love must be deserved or earned,
then it is something we owe to the one who earned it, and then it is more like
wages for labor than a gift we give without condition. Is love given
unconditionally or do you have to meet certain conditions in order to earn it?
Does love always have to have be reasonable, to have a logos, why, a reason –
or is love without why?’
But has the gift got anything to do with the carnivalesque? How is the
carnivality of festivals related to the giving of gifts? I would like to argue
that the fire that fuels the festivality of giving is none other than the
carnivality of the carnivalesque. But for that we have to consider the question
– How can we make the most of festivals? – to which we will turn in the last
part.
